The descriptive approach to defining humanity by both the ‘natural’ and ‘social’ sciences is highly reductive. This is of course not news. Reduction is a chief lever in the usefulness of these sciences after all. But every once and awhile it is useful to remind ourselves that we are more than our bodies and we are more than our minds. We exist not in isolation but in relation to things. We create ourselves as we act and as we react – as we play out our lives in the world.
Since architecture structures these actions and reactions, this intricate play of intersubjective life, it is not much of a stretch to agree with the architectural theorist Juhani Pallasmaa that we actually “exist through architecture.[1]” When we see a friend, framed by a hallway, we don’t just see them, we see them in relation to the architecture and we understand them in relation to the architecture. We have spent all of our lives in and around architecture – it is the shape of our world. As children we played in buildings; we daydreamed in buildings; we learned to walk and how to think and how to talk in buildings. Architecture from the very outset has been deeply etched in the very structure of our consciousness. “We cannot understand ourselves without it,” philosopher Mark Kingwell has written about architecture, “for it is where we eat and sleep and raise our children.[2]” Architecture, even in its most banal forms, is essential to how we understand ourselves, how we understand others, how we structure our image of the world.
As I’ve said before, we have a reciprocal relationship with our architecture. Architecture is a cultural element – like language, narrative, and technology – that is both formed by our ‘ways of living’ and simultaneously informs and structures the same. To quote Pallasmaa again: “architecture reflects, materializes, and eternalizes ideas and images of ideal life. Buildings and towns enable us to structure, understand, and remember the shapeless flow of reality, and, ultimately, to recognize and remember who we are.” [3] Our collective consciousness breathes through our buildings and our towns, spreading ideas and assumptions silently from one person to the next.
Since a person is never really an isolatable thing, then architecture, along with all of its implied meaning, is always a necessary part of our perpetual becoming. In a house, as Andrew Ballantyne puts it, we aren’t just a ‘person in a house’, but actually together we become ‘house-plus-person’[4], a sort of an architectural cyborg. We form a sort of assemblage with our architecture. Even living in the simplest of huts we are sort of architectural cyborgs.
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